Fear: Trump in the White House(47)
Trump did not like, or buy, any of the arguments. “It has nothing to do with it,” Trump said.
Cohn brought in Lawrence B. Lindsey, a Harvard economist who had held Cohn’s job under President George W. Bush. Lindsey bluntly asked, Why are you spending any time thinking about our trade deficit? You should be thinking about the economy as a whole. If we can buy cheap products abroad and we can excel in other areas—service and high-tech products—that should be the focus. The global marketplace provided immense benefits to Americans.
“Why don’t we manufacture things at home?” Lindsey asked. “We’re a manufacturing country.”
Of course the United States manufactured things, but reality did not match the vision in Trump’s mind. The president clung to an outdated view of America—locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines.
Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories.
Each month Cohn brought Trump the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, called JOLTS, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He realized he was being an asshole by rubbing it in because each month was basically the same, but he didn’t care.
“Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president. “See, the biggest leavers of jobs—people leaving voluntarily—was from manufacturing.”
“I don’t get it,” Trump said.
Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?”
Cohn added, “People don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.”
Trump wasn’t buying it.
Several times Cohn just asked the president, “Why do you have these views?”
“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”
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Staff secretary Rob Porter had been hired by Priebus. He came into the job with five-star recommendations from people who had served as staff secretaries to Republican presidents. Priebus had required Porter almost to sign a blood oath of loyalty to him. “It’s great you went to Harvard, Oxford; you’re smart and everybody vouches for you. But what really matters to me is that you’re going to be loyal to me.”
Porter had overlapped at Harvard with Jared Kushner, who had taken a class there taught by Porter’s father, Roger Porter, who had served on the staffs of Presidents Ford, the first Bush and Reagan. Jared and Porter met during the transition for about two hours. The first hour also seemed like a loyalty test.
Trump had great instincts and was a political genius, Kushner said, but he was going to take some getting used to. “You’re going to have to learn how to handle him. How to relate to him.”
Though he had not been a Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign, Porter had accepted the job. By Inauguration Day he had not yet met Trump. During the speech Porter sat behind the podium and winced when Trump invoked “American carnage.” He left two thirds of the way through the speech so he could begin his duties and meet the new president.
“I’m Rob Porter, Mr. President. I’m your staff secretary.” It was clear Trump had no clue what that was or who Porter was. Jared told Trump that Porter was going to structure and order Trump’s life.
Trump looked at the two of them as if to say, What are you talking about? You’re not doing anything like that. No one’s going to do that. The president walked away without saying anything to find a TV screen.
The first official piece of paper for Trump to sign was the legislation granting retired Marine General James Mattis a waiver to become secretary of defense. Mattis had retired from the military less than the legally mandated seven years before being permitted to serve as secretary of defense.
Another matter was withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a regional free trade deal negotiated under Obama that lowered tariffs and provided a forum to resolve intellectual property and labor disputes between the U.S. and 11 other nations, including Japan, Canada and numerous countries in Southeast Asia.
During the transition several people had told Trump that he didn’t have to do it on day one. It was a little more complicated. It ought to be discussed.
“No way, no how,” Trump said. “This was on the campaign. We’re not backing off this. We’re signing it. Draw it up.”
He signed the papers to formally withdraw on January 23, the first full weekday of his presidency.
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“The Trump trade agenda does indeed remain severely hobbled by political forces within the West Wing,” Peter Navarro, the White House assistant heading the National Trade Council, wrote in an Eyes Only two-page memo to the president and Chief of Staff Priebus on March 27, 2017.
Navarro, who agreed with Trump’s view that trade deficits mattered a great deal, was furious. He had been unable to get traction in the first two months of the Trump presidency. “It is impossible to get a trade action to your desk for consideration in a timely manner,” Navarro wrote.